Chapter Twelve — Hollow Psalms
The ash no longer fell.
It hung—midair—like a thought suspended between breaths. The city of Arakan remained, but it did not move. Not forward. Not back. It had become a body that refused to decay, refusing death, refusing life.
A whisper clung to the ruins. The kind that asked:What now?
Kaelen Vorr stood in the sanctum of the dead Choir, barefoot.
The floor was cold stone, polished by centuries of processions. No songs. No echoes. Only the lingering warmth of forgotten hymns—ghosts without mouths to speak them.
A fragment of a Psalm drifted through his mind. Not fully formed.We were ash before we were fire.We were silence before we were voice.We are neither now—only the scream that forgets it ever was a throat.
He opened his eyes.
Selene stood before him, her armor newly lacquered, hair pulled back in tight, ritual braids. In her arms, the Bone Hymnal—a codex of forbidden tones, once used only in rites of last breath.
"You'll use it?" she asked.
Kaelen didn't reply.
"You'll need to bleed for it," she continued. "Every verse has a cost."
He touched the edges of the Hymnal. The binding sang under his fingers—low and distant, like the memory of a scream underwater.
"I've bled," Kaelen said. "But I haven't sung."
The Council met that dusk, beneath the twin spires of the Risen.
It was not a council by tradition—no robes, no circles of votive lights. Just six people in a half-collapsed chamber, sitting on broken pews.
One of them—a boy with a torn jaw and cybernetic eye—asked:
"Why do we keep fighting? The Dominion doesn't want to kill us. They want our breath. That means we're valuable."
Kaelen stared at him.
Not with anger.
With weight.
"You mistake value for mercy," he said. "They don't want to keep us. They want to convert us. Sanctify us. Turn us into echoes of their own silence."
"But isn't that survival?" the boy pressed. "A muted life is still—"
"A life not your own is just a mouth with someone else's teeth."
The chamber fell quiet.
No vote was cast. No decree issued.
Only this:
Kaelen stood. And when he spoke next, it was with breath thick as stone.
"We go to the Cathedral of Loss. We walk through the Hollow Psalms. And if we reach the Cenotaph, we scream."
They marched at dawn.
Not in formation. Not as soldiers.
But as fragments of song—each carrying a verse that didn't know if it would ever be heard.
The Cathedral of Loss was not a place.
It was a consequence.
Miles of ruined silence—deep canyons carved by sonic warfare, where hymns once blasted apart worlds. Choir relics, broken bones of resonance towers, and shattered amplification pylons dotted the dust.
Here, sound did not travel. It limped.
Lira stepped beside Kaelen as they descended into the canyon. Her boots sank into the crushed bones of instruments. "This place," she whispered, "feels like a grave."
"It is."
"Of what?"
"Faith. And fear."
Selene walked ahead, silent.
Her hand rested on the Bone Hymnal. She did not pray. She counted her pulse—each thud a reminder that rhythm, too, could be a blade.
Hours passed. Perhaps days. Time frayed at the edges.
Kaelen felt himself fragment.
The terrain shifted—deeper still—until they reached a chamber carved into the mountain's marrow. Walls made not of stone, but calcified sound. Screams petrified mid-echo. Each pillar pulsed faintly with residual resonance. The air tasted like memory.
And there, at the center: the Cenotaph.
A spire of translucent bone, fused with strands of Choirsteel, etched with thousands of names. None of them complete. Only fragments.
Lira approached it, tracing the first few sigils.
"I recognize none of them," she said.
"You're not meant to," Selene replied. "They're not names. They're intentions that died before they became words."
Kaelen placed his palm on the Cenotaph.
And it wept.
His mind broke open.
He saw visions. Not of past. Not of future. But of failed potential.
A Choir that never sang.
A god that never awoke.
A girl who never made it past the first breath.
He saw himself—on a throne of mouths—screaming endlessly into a black sky, not to be heard, but to be emptied.
He staggered back.
And the Cenotaph pulsed.
Selene opened the Bone Hymnal.
"Begin the Hollow Psalm," she intoned. "Verse One."
Kaelen did not speak.
He sang.
It was not song in the way mortals understood.
It was breath shaped into truth. Pain made audible. Memory given teeth.
The Hymnal burned with each note. Lira clutched her ears. Two others bled from the nose and dropped to their knees. The Cenotaph vibrated violently, and one of its sigils cracked—shattering like brittle bone.
But Kaelen sang.
Verse Two.
Verse Three.
And then, silence.
The kind of silence that watches you sleep.
Far above, in the Dominion's listening crypts, alarms blared.
A breath had been registered.
Not one of theirs.
Back in the chamber, Kaelen collapsed.
His throat bled. His ribs ached. His voice gone.
But Selene knelt beside him, her expression not of worry, but awe.
"You broke a verse," she whispered. "No one has done that in centuries."
"What does it mean?" Lira asked.
"It means the old restraints are cracking. He's not just singing."
Kaelen coughed blood.
"He's unmaking the silence."
Outside, as they prepared to leave the Cathedral, Kaelen sat with the Bone Hymnal on his lap. He traced the scorched page where Verse Three had burned away.
Lira sat beside him.
"You alright?" she asked.
He didn't respond.
She looked out at the ash plains.
"Do you think we're insane?"
"Probably."
"And yet we follow you."
He looked at her, finally.
"Then I must be insane, too."
She smiled faintly.
"Good. I'd hate to die under someone sane."
As night returned, the breathless winds carried the faintest resonance—like a distant voice trying to remember its name.
And Kaelen whispered, to no one:
"I won't let you forget."